


Cry me a river (but pay me first)

by yarrie



Series: Grass is Greener Syndrome [1]
Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Awashima's hobby is taking EVERYTHING seriously, Awashima's hobby is taking Munakata seriously, F/F, Fushimi is Tired (TM), Fushimi is a living custody battle, Fushimi/Hirasaka friendship, Hirasaka and Fushimi bond over their fucked up lives, Hirasaka is part troll, I mean it is but it's not treated as crack, I swear Hirasaka/Yayoi is not crack, Light Snarky Angst, M/M, Munakata's hobby is embarrassing people, and their lack of fucks, or something like it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 08:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yarrie/pseuds/yarrie
Summary: Hirasaka Douhan learns that Fushimi Saruhiko is pretty awful at making friends, but at least he's good at making enemies who are fond of him.Like Yatagarasu.Like the Scepter 4 special operations squad.Like Douhan herself.





	Cry me a river (but pay me first)

When people asked her about it later—and a lot of people did—Douhan could never find the words to explain just how much Fushimi Saruhiko had bewildered her.

And it wasn't like she hadn't  _tried_. Fushimi was the kind of person who was known for being alone, who was sort of famous for it, really, which meant that far too many people were curious about how she managed to work with him for a month without dying an early death.

But it wasn't the grand story people seemed to take it for, not even close.

It was, in her humble opinion, barely even a story at all. Fushimi had needed someone to do his dirty work, and she had been the most convenient candidate, nothing more, nothing less. But no one wanted to hear a story like that, no matter how true it was.

Douhan, as a rule, did not care about what other people wanted, but she did care about making people leave her alone as much as possible, and this persistent outsider curiosity was getting in the way of that. So this was what she settled on, in the end: "He was working for the Blues and I was working for the Greens, and I was just important enough to catch but not important enough to kill. So when the time came—when he decided that he was going to be just as good at betraying the Blues as he had been at cleaning up their messes—he let me out of my cell so that I could play fetch for him."

The first time she tested this particular version of events on a live audience, Fushimi said, "Not  _just as good_. I was better at being a traitor than I ever was at being a Clansman."

The second time, he said, "If you were a dog, I would've returned you to the kennel and gotten one that could actually follow orders."

The third time, he said, "You don't owe them an explanation, you know. You don't owe them anything."

The fourth time, he didn't say anything at all, because a Blue clansman she didn't recognize jumped in to ask, "That's it?" as if it was a personal affront to him that the story wasn't very interesting.

So Douhan smiled, and shrugged, and said, "Everyone's a critic. Why don't you ask Fushimi, if you're so curious?"

As it turned out, nobody was that curious.

To be perfectly fair, people weren't wrong to assume that it hadn't been as neat as she and Fushimi made it sound, but it hadn't been that complicated, either.

Or, at least, it hadn't been that complicated for  _Douhan_.

For Fushimi, it had been...a different story. It was lucky for both of them, for everyone, that Fushimi's loyalty to the Blue King had held out, but that didn't stop Douhan from thinking that Fushimi was a fool for turning the Green King down.

* * *

These were the facts:

Fushimi was a loner because he preferred to be.

Douhan was a loner because she was used to it.

But these, these were facts, too:

Douhan was 28 years old and five of those years had been spent as the only person in the Green clan who didn't want to cross the J-rank threshold, because she didn't want a King and she especially didn't want a boy like Nagare as her king.

Fushimi was 19 years old and five of those years had been spent bouncing through different Clans, collecting colors in his aura, because he didn't want a King, either—or, at the very least, he didn't want to want a King.

It was one of the things they agreed on: the loss of the Slate was not such a bad thing.

* * *

Fushimi was a very precise person with very precise goals, and he seemed to expect that same precision in everyone else, which meant that most people considered him a hard person to work with. Douhan didn't, but then again, most people considered her to be especially  _easy_  to work with as long as they could pay her rates, so maybe she and Fushimi canceled each other out. Either way, when Fushimi hired her, it hadn't been a simple matter of fetching JUNGLE points. There was one major complicating factor, and that was Fushimi himself.

More specifically, it was Fushimi's history as a Blue Clansman. His bounty was never retired, even after he joined the Green Clan, because it wouldn't be like the Green clan to make things easy or fair. Consequently, Douhan's job in the early days didn't have anything to do with points. She was just a warm body with a pair of eyes that could watch his back while he set up his city-wide chessboard, which involved massive amounts of coding on his end, which translated to massive amounts of waiting on hers. She suffered it without complaint for the most part, except for the time that she had been forced to sit in the corner of an internet cafe for hours and hours as he beat JUNGLE's technology into submission, at which point she did say, dryly, "It was kind of you to break me out before you needed me."

He scoffed derisively in reply, not even looking up from the monitor. "I needed to make sure that you weren't too injured to be useful."

"Too injured," she repeated, looking directly at him.

"Yes."

"After  _you_  skewered me with your knives."

"I did not  _skewer_  you with my knives."

"I'm fairly certain you did."

"No. I  _cut_  you with my knives. If I had skewered you, we would've had to put you in the medical bay instead of a cell, and that would've been inconvenient for all of us."

She raised a fine eyebrow at him. "The point still stands: I have knife marks. From you."

"Yes." He didn't turn to look at her, but a hint of impatience fluttered in his voice. "Is that going to be a problem?"

"No, but most people would've considered it too risky to hire someone with a valid reason to take revenge on them."

"And most people," Fushimi said distantly, "would've refused to go somewhere alone—and unarmed—with someone who once poked holes in them with throwing knives."

There was a long silence.

"If anyone's the fool in this scenario, it's not me," Fushimi said.

"Not only you, at any rate," she acknowledged. Then, casually, "I'm going to need my weapons at some point."

"I have them. Your armor, too."

"You planned this. I'm impressed."

"Are you, now."

"Yes." It was mostly true. Fushimi had the sort of competence that usually went unnoticed if you weren't looking for it. That was the curse—and the blessing—of being so capable.

"If something so simple impresses you, maybe I should've found someone else to do this with."

She didn't smile. By pure force of will, she didn't smile. "From your long list of possible partners-in-crime?"

He snorted again.

They both knew that his list had exactly zero names on it. There was no one in the world he trusted enough to call a  _partner_.

* * *

The thing was, she hadn't wanted to accept Fushimi's offer of employment, money or no money. She'd known from their very first meeting that he could've killed her at any time without a second thought. She'd known, also, that he hadn't kept his cuts shallow out of mercy. That there had been a reason for his restraint. That there had been a reason for everything.

But because of all that, she had also known that he was just like her: someone who understood his place in the world in terms of debts instead of emotional attachments.

Maybe that was why, in the end, she had been willing to sign her free will away to him. They were both fluent in the language of pragmatism.

It didn't hurt that Fushimi was also immune to her physical charms. She didn't have to set explicit limits on the extent of their arrangement. He was so uninterested in the soft curves of her body that she could probably walk around nude without disturbing his equilibrium. It was just another spot of potential friction that Fushimi skipped right over, just another thing that she was given before she even got the chance to demand it, because Fushimi's need for personal boundaries went so far beyond her own. 

Douhan had met people like Fushimi before. Not often, but enough to know the way they worked—how they couldn't rightfully be labeled by any sort of sexuality, how their sense of attraction usually began and ended with one person, if it existed at all.

She suspected that Fushimi had already found his one person.

She also suspected that Fushimi wished he hadn't.

It wasn't like she noticed these things because she wanted to know anything about Fushimi. It was just that interesting people were rare in the circles that Douhan moved in, and Fushimi was nothing if not interesting.

* * *

Two days of coding later, he asked her off-handedly if there was anyone in the city she wanted to whitelist.

She blinked at him. "Myself," she offered.

"Anyone  _else_ ," he clarified, passively rather than actively annoyed, which was honestly an improvement at this point.

She raised an eyebrow. Tested a theory. "Sukuna Gojou."

A genuinely startled expression crossed his face. "...You actually like that brat?" he asked, thick with disbelief.

"No," she said, smiling a little inwardly. "But I wondered what you would say."

He gave her the sullen look of a boy who'd never quite had the luxury of being a boy. "What I would say is that he doesn't need you to whitelist him—he doesn't need  _anyone_  to whitelist him. He's hardly a innocent bystander in this game."

"I know."

But Fushimi continued, as if he hadn't heard her: "Besides, he'd slaughter you if you ever fought him one-on-one, and I need you alive, so he's not exactly a good target anyway."

"Do  _you_  have a whitelist?" she asked idly.

His shoulders went tight, then far too loose. There was nothing relaxed about his body language. "Don't need one."

"Don't need one," she said, "or don't want me to know about it?"

"Why," Fushimi said, a peculiar smirk tilting his lips, "would I need a whitelist? I have a job to do, and that kind of self-indulgence won't help me finish it."

"I didn't ask you if you  _need_  a whitelist," she replied. "I asked if you  _have_  one."

His gaze was shrewd.

"There's a difference," she said. "Those are two different questions."

"I'm aware."

"So do you have a whitelist?"

"If I had one," Fushimi said, "you wouldn't be on it."

She looked at him. "Would  _you_  be on it?"

He looked back, impassive. "No. Like I said, I don't need that kind of self-indulgence."

That had been her first real hint that something else was going on, something larger than Fushimi's purported bitterness against his former Clans.

It was unfortunate that he had forbidden her from fighting, because she had nothing to do with her time but speculate.

Even so, by the end of the week, she hadn't gotten very far in guessing what Fushimi was up to, but Fushimi had gotten very far indeed in whatever he was doing to the JUNGLE app on her phone. It involved a dizzying amount of math and code that she couldn't even wrap her eyes around, much less her head, and when she'd asked for an explanation he'd gone into a extensive lecture on security exploits that only would've been helpful if she had known enough about coding to not need the lecture in the first place.

And then he muttered, "I can't even count all the ways I would've made this app differently if I were in charge of JUNGLE," and the lecture immediately trailed to an awkward stop.

After all, he  _was_  going to be one of the people in charge of JUNGLE soon enough. His plain discomfort with the idea had been her second clue that something was up.

And the third clue, well...

That had come when Fushimi presented her with the actual fruits of his labor: an entirely unassuming list of names.

But Douhan took one look at it and knew, intuitively, what it was: a hitlist.

"These," he told her, waving his hand over the bright green dots on the screen, "are people with active bounties who are worth going after. And these," he pointed to the soft gray dots, "are people who aren't on the list, either because their bounties aren't worth the time, or because they'd destroy you. Work from the list. Don't waste your time with anybody else."

It seemed sensible enough, until she had a chance to look over the actual names she'd been given. "The second-in-command of the Blues is worth 10,000, but she's not on this list."

He slowly turned his head to face her, an unreadable expression on his face. "And?"

"She has raw power, but her skill in combat is not very impressive. I could probably take her on."

"Probably," Fushimi intoned, still neutral.

"Is there a reason she's not on the list, then?"

"Are you sure you want me to answer that question?" Fushimi asked, which was an answer in itself.

And from Douhan's perspective, it was also proof that Fushimi was playing a very different game from the one that it looked like he was playing.

* * *

Fushimi finally sicced her on her targets a day later, and she went almost twenty four hours straight before the adrenaline rush of her newly regained freedom finally wore off. After days of feeling like an overclocked wind-up toy, even the exhaustion of her body barely slowed her pace.

She was U-rank again within the week.

Fushimi hadn't been impressed—"It's a marathon, not a sprint, Hirasaka."—but she didn't think he was capable of being impressed, so that was alright.

* * *

Much, much later, it turned out that he  _was_  capable of being impressed, just not with her ability to gather points for him. No, what ended up impressing him in the end was her sheer single-mindedness.

Douhan was perfectly willing to spend all of her time racking up obscene numbers of JUNGLE points and passing them along to Fushimi. She paused for three things only: eating, sleeping, and fussing over her outfits. Otherwise, she blasted straight through her list of search-and-destroys like a machine.

"It's a marathon, not a sprint," eventually evolved into the slightly gentler, "It's a marathon, you don't have to sprint."

"As long as I have legs and you have money, you can't stop me," she told him. And then, with a touch of reproach for his hypocrisy, she added, "Especially when you're matching me point for point."

"I handle higher bounties than you do."

"Is that meant to encourage me to slow down?"

"No. It's meant to explain why you can't catch up."

"Is that a challenge," she asked idly, "and if so, will you pay me extra if I win?"

"You won't," came the startlingly self-assured reply, "but I  _will_  deduct from your pay if you collapse from exhaustion."

"I'm fairly certain I know my own limits."

"And I'm equally certain you don't."

"Well then," she smiled serenely at him, turning off the data transfer, "I guess we'll see who's right by the end of this month, hmm?"

"It's your money." He didn't sound concerned in the slightest; obviously, he didn't see the need to micro-manage her anymore. Douhan chose to take his inattention as a compliment. She was almost certainly the first person he'd ever met who could match his workaholism. It made their working relationship simple. Not easy, but simple.

* * *

"You could have been the Green King," he once told her.

He hadn't meant it as a compliment—it had been an offhand comment, thrown out like he was talking about the weather. Maybe because he  _was_  talking about the weather, if only tangentially.

That January had been especially wet, and cold, and unpleasant in general. Even though he was functionally homeless, Fushimi didn't seem to mind it—or maybe he was too proud to mind it. Either way, in the first few weeks of their arrangement, he often showed up to their meetings with flattened hair and water-logged clothes.

Douhan, on the other hand, had nice things, and she really liked those nice things, so she  _did_  mind the endless rain. She even started walking around with a portal over her head to divert the rain elsewhere. It was a little lacking in elegance, perhaps, but no one could argue its effectiveness, and she had never been one to sacrifice the latter for the former. Mishakuji used to complain endlessly about how her portals disturbed the aesthetic of a rainy day, but she was not Mishakuji. She liked the man, and they shared a similar taste in almost everything, but philosophically they agreed to disagree on the relative importance of beauty and practicality.

Fushimi, on the other hand, was more practical than either of them, so it was jarring when his first reaction to her non-umbrella umbrella was virtually identical to Mishakuji's. In fact, he glared at it so accusingly that she was actually concerned it would disappear from the force of his stare.

And then, still glaring at the broken line of raindrops falling overhead, he told her, "You could have been the Green King."

She eyed him warily as she held out her PDA, not sure what to make of his unexpectedly sullen behavior. Several thousand JUNGLE points bled away in a stream of green light. Finally, once the exchange was complete, she murmured, "That's awfully nice of you to say."

He snorted. "It wasn't a compliment."

"That doesn't stop me from taking it as one." She tilted her head, curiosity getting the best of her. "Why do you think I could have been the Green King?"

"All of the Blues have water-based abilities, but Munakata has also been known to use ice." Ever since he'd left the Blue clan, he'd foregone honorifics for his former King.  _Munakata_  rattled off his tongue casually, naturally, even though the circumstances behind his current estrangement were neither casual nor natural. "And the Reds," he continued, with barely a hitch, "all have fire, but Anna also has those marbles of hers."

"And I," she said in realization, "am the only one in my clan who can make these." She gestured over their heads, where the rain was still falling and disappearing into a halo of green.

Fushimi simply shrugged. "The Slate has never been subtle about its favorites." He held his hand out and let a fine tremor of green electricity crackle over his skin.

She wondered, then, if he was disappointed in himself—in the blandness of his own powers. He might've obtained three colors, but the actual nature of his abilities had never changed.

But no, she quickly realized how silly the question was. Of course he was disappointed in himself. He was always disappointed in himself.

If she had been a normal person, she might have pitied him a little for being such an emotional black hole. As it was, though, she calculated the probability that his issues would affect their arrangement—slim to none—and she left it at that.

* * *

The next time it rained, he had an umbrella.

* * *

The next time after that, she gave him a key to her apartment and told him that if he paid half of the rent, he could come and go as he pleased.

He accepted the offer with surprisingly little resistance, probably because she didn't offer it under the guise of charity. It felt like a natural extension of their working relationship, even, because she didn't tend to think of Fushimi as an actual person, and she knew that he didn't think of her that way either.

It became normal to see him in the mornings as she woke up and he went to sleep, and in the evenings when the reverse happened. They were almost never in the apartment at the same time. It was co-existence in its mildest, least offensive form.

And it was...comfortable.

Fushimi Saruhiko, she reflected, was never going to be a friend to her. He was something else entirely—but at least it didn't seem to be a bad thing.

* * *

When Douhan was eighteen years old, she worked for a semi-successful photography studio staffed by a man who lived and breathed for his art, who seemed to think that too much business meant that he was betraying his artistic principles. He asked her to be his model—though  _muse_  was the term he used—and she agreed, and for three years he framed pictures of her soft breasts and inner thighs in his little gallery. She didn't regret it. It paid well.

But she was reminded, now, of the things he used to blither on about—how every photo was like a snapshot of the soul behind the camera, how you could read a photographer's thoughts and fears in the tilt of the lens and the shadows of their compositions. It had sounded like a bunch of artistic nonsense, then.

It still did, but now it sounded like a bunch of artistic nonsense that might contain a kernel of truth in it.

She knew how Fushimi looked in person—beautiful and fierce and cold in equal measure, with long, devastating eyelashes around the pitholes that were his eyes.

But when she looked down at her PDA and inspected the picture she had just taken, all she saw was a boy playing war, with a knife hanging from his mouth at an absurd angle.

"Did you just take a picture of me?" Fushimi asked, dropping the knife onto the ground. An ever-present note of irritation colored his voice.

"You need a new profile picture on the Jungle app," she told him. "It's part of the reason people come after you. The Scepter 4 uniform is very distinctive."

He made a soft noise of understanding. "You...have a point," he said, a bit reluctantly.

"Besides," she added, a tiny smirk on her lips, "you look nice without that silly fur jacket. I should take you shopping with me. I bet your taste in fashion is similar to mine." She tugged gently on the back of Fushimi's beads.

"Oh hell no," Fushimi said, tugging the beads back.

"Why not?"

"This," he gestured over his body, "does not mean I'm interested in  _fashion_."

"I think everyone should be interested in fashion," she said, undeterred, "especially people who plan on living hard and dying young. Or, in your case, working hard and dying young. You never know when someone's going to finally get the better of you. Why not prepare for it?"

"Are you telling me that I should take an interest in what I wear so that I can look good dying?"

"Yes," she said, in complete seriousness.

He rolled his eyes and tugged on the necklace around his neck as she sent him the picture. "I wasn't even looking at the camera," he murmured, frowning down at his phone.

"Which makes you look less intimidating. That's a good thing," she informed him. He didn't look intimidating at all, in fact. It reminded her, oddly enough, of Sukuna, whose own picture featured a smug grin that made it all too obvious how young he was. "People will underestimate you."

He scoffed at her. "It's never been my  _face_  that people find intimidating."

Which she already knew, of course. Not because he'd made a confidant out of her, but because she was the same way.

Simple, but not easy.

* * *

Bit by bit, she noticed things changing. 

They were little things, for the most part—like how she started making dinner for two, leaving out everything that he considered offensible without comment because she didn't care about his long-term health (and, of course, because there was a good chance that he wouldn't need to worry about long-term  _anything_  because he'd be dead).

And then there were slightly-bigger-than-little things—like Fushimi quietly upgrading her security system on a whim, without any discussion of monetary compensation one way or another.

Somewhere along the way, her relationship with Fushimi had become something other than a business arrangement, and she wasn't sure when. No, that wasn't quite right. It was still a business arrangement at its core, because in the end they were good at working together and that was more important than anything else. But at some point she had learned the names of Fushimi's coworkers and the insults Fushimi attached to each one, and at some point Fushimi had learned more than he ever cared to know about Mishakuji's makeup habits. Their relationship had gained a thin veneer of companionship.

And then, in the last week of January, Fushimi began to actually talk to her. It was a trickle, not a downpour, but it was something she noticed happening because it was something worth noticing.

The thing was, when you only socialized with a single person for a month, sometimes conversations just sort of...happened. Real conversations, not just tongue clicks and exchanges of money.

And that was dangerous territory with Fushimi, whose tongue was as sharp as the knives he favored so much—though of course his sharpest weapon was locked up tight in his skull.

Fushimi never did tell her that he was still working for the Blue clan—that was something she figured out on her own. There were only so many excuses he could give for why none of the inner circle of the Blue or Red Clans appeared on her hitlist, and she wasn't stupid.

He knew that she knew, of course, but like so many things that January, it went largely undiscussed.

In fact, the longer their arrangement went on, the less he spoke at all. His words were like grains of sand in an hourglass, spilling slower and slower as his time ran out.

She still remembered with vivid clarity the last real conversation they had that January, not because it had been special in any way, but because it had been the last. Fushimi had been spread out on her couch, looking languidly at ease and dead to the world all at once. She'd thought, in fact, that he was asleep until he said suddenly, "You're a fool to care about money at a time like this."

With a slow, exasperated sigh, she said, "Should I be like you and pledge my loyalty to a dying man, then?"

Fushimi scoffed. "We're all dying."

"But some of us are dying faster than others."

He shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'm probably going to die before the Captain, anyways."

She turned her head to look at him, fixing her eyes on the ashen cast of his face. "That's your own fault, you know. If I were you, I would've abandoned this mission a long time ago."

He snorted. "If you were me, you wouldn't have even considered joining the Blue clan in the first place, so there would've been no mission to abandon."

"Why do you say that? I'm working for  _you_ , aren't I?" She shrugged. "If the Blue clan had offered me the kind of money you're giving me now, I would've joined a long time ago."

"You're asking for that kind of salary from a legal government job?" he snorted.

She smiled faintly. "Miracles have been known to happen."

"Not miracles on that scale," Fushimi said.

She raised an eyebrow. "They don't even pay  _you_  well?"

"Not well enough to willingly die in the line of duty."

"That says more about you than it does about how much you earn," she told him. And while she knew better than to voice it aloud, she noted that the lack of pay wasn't exactly deterring him from his mission.

What was it like, she wondered, to be so sure of yourself that it didn't matter who did or didn't reward you for it?

Hopefully, she wouldn't ever find out. She had no urge to share Fushimi's fate.

* * *

In hindsight, it made sense that she and Fushimi gravitated towards each other. After all, she wasn't on speaking terms with her Clan either.

It was partially because of her own lingering resentment that they had let her languish in a cell, even though she'd always known that rescue missions weren't exactly the bread and butter of the Green Clan. It was also because her superiors simply hadn't contacted her, which was suspicious in its own right.

That changed at the end of January, when Douhan found a private mission from Mishakuji Yukari waiting for her on her phone. 3,000 points. All she had to do was meet him and have a little chat.

Under normal circumstances she would've taken the mission without a second thought. She actually liked Mishakuji, after all.

Now, however, she had to weigh the benefits of getting those points against preserving Fushimi's position in JUNGLE's food chain. As suspicious as it was that her superiors had waited for so long to drop in on her, it was even more suspicious that they had chosen to contact her  _now_ , when Fushimi was just one or two days away from joining their ranks. If Mishakuji had any interest in knocking Fushimi out of the game...well, Douhan wouldn't be able to dip into Fushimi's mysteriously deep pockets anymore.

On the other hand, Fushimi had warned her that he wasn't going to survive to see February, and he was not the kind of person to be morbid without a very good reason.

A dog could not have two masters.

She tapped her finger on the corner of her PDA lightly. Then she hit  _Accept_.

And afterwards, she went to her closet and picked out a pretty outfit, something that would look good even on a corpse.

* * *

"Douhan-chan!" Mishakuji Yukari stood up when he saw her, grinning widely. He kissed her cheek. "How are you, how are you? It's been a while, no?"

"Yes," she said. "It has." She crossed her arms, careful not to crumple the ruffles of her shirt.

"Ah, Douhan-chan," he said, with a dramatic sigh, "you have no idea what I've suffered over the past few weeks without your lovely company. No one else appreciates the pursuit of beauty like you do."

Wary as she was, she couldn't help but feel a tiny flare of fondness for him. Mishakuji never changed. "I like what you've done with your eyelashes," she said, gesturing towards the soft plum sparkles rimming his eyes. "Brings out the color of your eyes."

He preened. "It's a new powder I'm testing out. You sprinkle it on mascara and voila! Sparkly lashes. And it doesn't clump, either. If you'd like, I can give you a sample."

"Oh," she said, smiling a little now. "That'd be lovely, actually. Is there a gold version?"

With a dramatic sigh, he waved her off. "Of course there is. Everyone and their mother makes gold glitter."

"And no one does it well." She shrugged. "It's always worth a shot, though. I can't find anything good to match my hair anymore."

"You could just dye your hair again—I liked you as a redhead too."

"Red would clash with my armor."

He lowered his lashes, an amused smile playing on his face. "That's true. But anything and everything beautiful would clash with that horrible armor of yours."

"If you want to buy a replacement set for me," she said lightly, "I'd be happy to take your money."

"You're always happy to take my money, Douhan-chan." His smile widened a fraction. "Mine, and everyone else's."

The pause in the conversation was short, but palpable. He didn't mention Fushimi. He didn't have to.

As calmly and placidly as Douhan could manage—which was very calmly and placidly—she asked, "Why shouldn't I be?"

He tilted his head, still smiling. "Ahhh, well, I suppose I can't argue with that."

Which, apparently, was all he wanted to say on the matter. After that, the specter of Fushimi Saruhiko faded from the periphery of their conversation as if it had never been there in the first place.

She went home with 3,000 points, a tiny vial of purple glitter, and a sense of wonder about how easily Fushimi had carved himself a place in their world.

No, that wasn't quite right. It was more like...all this time, there had been an empty niche in the Green clan, and it had been waiting for Fushimi to fill it.

* * *

She earned 14,000 points that day—even without the 3,000 she'd earned from Mishakuji, it was a personal record.

She actually felt a little pleased with herself until three in the afternoon, when she ran into Fushimi—almost literally. He had been leaning against the wall casually, inches from the path of her portal, and if she had been paying just a little less attention, her throat would have had a knife in it. "You took a mission that wasn't on the approved list," he said, without preamble.

It took a lot of nerve not to flinch away from his gaze. She had no idea how he'd found out so quickly, but it didn't surprise her that he had. "Is that a problem?" she asked stiffly.

"Who did you kill for those 3,000 points, Hirasaka?" he asked, soft and dangerous.

"No one," she said coolly, willing her heartbeat to slow down.

"No one?"

" _No one_ ," she said, letting genuine surprise color her voice. "What's gotten into you, Fushimi?"

He gave her a hard look and it felt like he could cut her on the blue glint of his eyes. Then he clicked his tongue. "How did you get those points, then?"

It didn't even occur to her to lie. "Mishakuji. He said he wanted to speak with me."

Fushimi paused. Then, softly, he murmured, "Ah."

She held her breath. Well, at least she was wearing something pretty.

"In that case," Fushimi continued, "I don't care."

She stared at him like a dumb animal. "You...what?"

"I don't care," he repeated, thin on patience. "Just don't do it again."

"I...see." She didn't see, not even a little bit, but for obvious reasons she didn't want to question Fushimi's rare show of mercy.

He clicked his tongue at her again. "What are you standing around gawking for? Go do your job. I'm not paying you to sit around."

Douhan made a hasty exit through the wall behind her. It wasn't until she was fifteen minutes and three streets away, though, that she could finally breathe freely.

She didn't know why he needed all those knives—he could kill people with mood whiplash alone.

"You liar," she thought aloud, off-balance in the most unpleasant way, "you  _did_  whitelist me."

* * *

Much, much later, she remembered that Yatagarasu was worth 3,000 points, and wasn't  _that_  an interesting coincidence?

But Fushimi wasn't paying her to think about interesting things, so she didn't. Much.

* * *

Fushimi never called her on her PDA.

Fushimi, as far as she could tell, wasn't in the habit of calling anybody.

So, when she woke up to the sound of her phone ringing and 'Fushimi Saruhiko' on the caller ID, she felt something like dread roll in her stomach. Dread, and finality, and inevitability. She snapped up the small device and held it to her ear. "Hirasaka here."

"Hirasaka." Fushimi's voice sounded strange and not-quite-right, like he was speaking through water. "Meet me behind Municipal Hall in fifteen minutes. Exactly fifteen minutes, that's very important—don't be early, and definitely don't be late."

"Meet you...for what?"

"For  _what_ , she asks." Fushimi's laughter sounded wrong too, as if someone was shaking nails out of his lungs.

She narrowed her eyes. "You understand that you'll be paying me extra for this." It wasn't precisely what she wanted to say, but talking about money had always been a safe option with Fushimi. They had an understanding about the importance of mutual convenience. It was what he'd expect from her.

There was a heavy pause on the other end, though, so maybe he hadn't expected it after all. "Fine," he said finally. "But start walking first. I'm not going to waste my time or money on you if you're late."

"We don't need to negotiate a rate right now, if it's really that urgent," she said, dodging the discarded kunai on the floor without bothering to pick them up. If Fushimi was calling for backup, he was counting on her aura abilities, not her proficiency with weapons.

"Actually," Fushimi said, voice steady and calm, "we do. We might not get another chance."

Realization descended on her like a fog. It felt like she was fighting to move, even though she was going through all the usual motions of putting her armor on at twice her usual speed. "I...see."

"Do you really," he drawled, not quite asking it but not quite stating it either.

"How on earth," she asked, pursing her lips, "do you manage to become more and more insufferable the closer you are to dying?"

He snorted. "At least it saves people the trouble of mourning for me."

"I've been told it doesn't work like that for most people." She sighed. "The world would be a much easier place if more of its inhabitants were like us."

"It'd also be a much shittier place," Fushimi said, like the ray of sunshine that he was.

"That goes without saying."

* * *

When Fushimi's knife hit the stolen phone in Kusanagi Izumo's hand, it felt like the end of an era, like the ending credits on an unfinished movie.

She waited and waited for it to feel like good-bye, too, but in the end, it never did—not even when Mishakuji showed up and she handed Fushimi over to him like a ferrywoman carrying a soul to the afterlife.

* * *

The problem was, she couldn't stop making meals for two, because apparently one month was enough to make it a habit.

Even when she reminded herself that Fushimi was no longer a factor in her daily routine, his ghost seemed to hang around, complaining silently about every little annoyance as if that would convince the world to bend to his wishes. And so, she cooked for two, and she cleaned the coverlets on her sofa like someone was still sleeping on them, and she washed Fushimi's spare clothes, and she kept a spare laundry basket in the living room even though there was no one to use it.

And one day when she was sweeping the floor she found Fushimi's umbrella—although, seeing as its original owner was getting himself killed, she supposed that it was  _her_  umbrella now.

It was a bit surreal, standing there in the middle of her living room with an unassuming black umbrella in her hand, knowing that Fushimi wasn't coming back for it—or for anything. Absurdly, she wondered if she ought to give it to the Blue clan just so that they'd have something physical to bury. After all, Nagare was not known for holding back. None of the Greens were.

That turned out to be the breaking point for her sanity, because the damn umbrella kept mocking her from its spot next to the door, perfectly conspicuous from nearly every angle in the apartment. There was no particular reason to obsess over it—after all, she had come to terms with Fushimi's death a very long time ago—but that didn't stop her from obsessing in her own way.

She managed to hold out for two hours.

Well, one hour and half.

...one hour and twenty minutes, according to the clock—she needed to get a new one, it was really starting to run slow.

"Insufferable," she said with a sigh, in the general direction of the umbrella, then she went to put her armor on.

She had never been one to sit on her hands and hope for the best, after all.

* * *

So, this—this man with blue eyes and a deceptively mild smile and a not-quite-intact heart—was Munakata Reisi.

She didn't know what she had been expecting, but it wasn't what she got.

"Hirasaka Douhan," he said, "I don't believe we've officially met."

"Actually, we did, when you put me in a cell," she said.

"Ah, yes, that does ring a bell."

The Blue King clearly had bad taste in subordinates, if Fushimi Saruhiko was any evidence at all, but she decided right then and there that Fushimi's taste in employers was worse.

"This is quite a fortunate turn of events, seeing as I was actually in the process of looking for you." He pushed his glasses up, smiling faintly.

She couldn't tell whether he was telling the truth or not. It didn't matter, though. "And why were you looking for me?"

"I imagine that you already know."

She peered at him with sharp eyes. "If you want to hire me, you're going to have to cut out the cryptic nonsense. Verbal contracts with amiguous terms are worse than useless."

His obvious amusement didn't wane in the slightest. "Very well. What would it cost to extract Fushimi-kun from the basement, alive and well?"

"A lot," she said.

"Naturally." His smile was utterly and ruthlessly benign.

"I'm aware that you were technically...fired." The word sounded strange and hollow on her tongue, because everyone knew you couldn't exactly fire a King. Still, somehow he'd gotten himself fired, which meant it would be harder for him to pay Douhan's prices. No matter. The money would come, sooner or later.

Munakata didn't look the least bit worried. "I'm certain we can still come to a mutually satisfying agreement."

She sighed. Now that she was in front of the man, she couldn't help but second-guess herself. But she was already here, making overtures to the Blue King, so in a sense she'd already gone down the path of no return. "I can do without your money. I'm after something else entirely."

Something flickered in his gaze. "Oh?"

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth and did her best not to phase through the wall out of sheer discomfort. "I want," she pronounced slowly and clearly, "reassurances for the future."

"I see," he said, and the flicker became full-blown interest. "You're hedging your bets, then. Very shrewd of you."

"You could say that."

"Hmmm." This time he gave her a small, but rather genuine, smile. "What sort of reassurances are you after?"

"Not putting me in a cell again would be a good start," she informed him.

The smile widened. "A very good start," he agreed.

* * *

When she finally found Fushimi, he was talking to Yatagarasu. That part wasn't so surprising.

What  _was_  surprising, though, was that they were talking with actual words. They might've even been having a conversation. She couldn't be sure, not with these two.

She debated, briefly, going up and interrupting their conversation. After all, every minute that passed was a minute that could end in the basement collapsing under them.

In the end, she didn't, because Fushimi would probably kill her for interrupting the moment.

* * *

"I don't recall asking for your services," he said, when she finally did appear.

"I've already received my payment from your superior," she told him.

He went very still. Then, very slowly, he turned his head to face her. A careful, thin smile was pulling at his lips.

If the situation had been any less serious, she would have told him that he had a pretty smile, and maybe he should show it off more if he really wanted to get Yatagarasu's attention. Unfortunately, there were already shouts coming from the hallway, so instead of indulging in a bit of well-deserved taunting, she pulled him up and phased them to the floor above.

Fushimi grasped her shoulder tightly when they landed, hissing softly.

"Sit," she said, eyeing his red-stained pants, "I'm going to wrap a tourniquet around your leg."

"We should get out first," Fushimi said, eyeing the ceiling critically.

"You're bleeding."

"It's a slow bleed...I'd already be dead if it wasn't."

She crossed her arms. "Blood rushes to your lower body when you accelerate against gravity. It may not be such a slow bleed by the time we get to the top."

He clicked his tongue and grumbled a bit, but he sat down.

Douhan surveyed the wound with a careful, thoughtful look. It was fairly deep, certainly deep enough to need stitches to heal properly. She didn't have anything sterile that could be used as a dressing, but if the Blues were even half as organized as they thought they were, they'd probably already have an ambulance waiting for him. "Hold still," she ordered, as she fished out her spare hair band and tied it tightly just above the edge of the wound. Blood oozed out from the pressure but it was slower than before, and by the time she finished tying off the last knot, the flow had slowed to a mere trickle.

"I think I liked you better when you were just a greedy bitch," Fushimi told her, breathing just a touch too quickly to convince her that he wasn't in pain.

"So did I," Douhan informed him.

He snorted. "Do you mean that you liked  _me_  better when you were a greedy bitch, or that you liked  _yourself_  better?"

"The latter. I've never liked you." She tightened the last knot on the makeshift tourniquet and grabbed Fushimi's arm to haul him up.

He snorted again, wrapping his arm around her shoulders with minimal fuss.

"And I wasn't aware that you ever liked me, either," Douhan added, hiding the smallest of smirks.

"I've recently discovered," Fushimi said, drier than the sand in a desert, "that I like you more than I like dying in a basement."

"I'm fairly certain you like  _vegetables_  more than dying in a basement."

He looked at her with narrow eyes as they shuffled towards more stable ground.

She looked back at him, eyes wide and innocent. "Or is that going too far?"

Fushimi clicked his tongue instead of replying. It wasn't an answer, but it felt like one, and it wasn't like Douhan expected anything else from him anyways.

She adjusted her grip, checked the path ahead of them for obstacles, and then they were moving up, up, up, and she was only aware of the wind rushing past her ears, the power buzzing through her veins, the silent countdown of every floor that they passed as they flew towards the surface—

9, 8, 7, and she upped the speed, just to get them out of there faster—

6, 5, 4, and things were going fine, just fine, which should have been a sign, because things were never this fine when Fushimi was involved. His eternal bad luck kicked in just before they reached the 3rd floor, in the space of a heartbeat that stretched just a touch too long, as she felt the thread linking them to their destination snap.

They almost crashed into the suddenly-too-solid roof.

Around their feet, the green glow of her powers flickered, and it took every ounce of concentration she had to keep them from falling. Once their feet were finally on the ground, Fushimi cursed aloud, swaying slightly against her. His face was sickly pale and she was sure that hers didn't look much better. "Hirasaka," he hissed.

"I don't know what happened," she said, staring at the sparks of green that flickered in her hand as she tried to open another portal. "It's not—"

" _I_  know what happened," Fushimi said, heavy with realization. "You were only ever borrowing the Green King's power—and he just took it back." As if on cue, there was a loud crash from below, and the whole basement shuddered.

She sucked in a sharp breath. "That...could make things difficult, then." She glanced at their feet, as if she could see all the way to the basement. "If he dies," she started to say, and wasn't that something? She'd never even considered Hisui Nagare's death as a possibility before this month—before Fushimi Saruhiko.

"Get out your PDA," Fushimi interjected sharply. The screen from his own PDA was casting green light over his features. She hadn't even seen him get it out.

There was a moment—well, almost a moment—when she wanted to ask him  _why_ , but then the moment passed and she was following his orders without a second thought.

Briskly, without even glancing at her, he asked, "How many Jungle points do you have?"

Her mouth said, "86,000," while her brain stalled, trying to understand what he wanted from her. "What are you—"

"Alright," he said, flicking his fingers over the screen. A very, very familiar arc of green light passed from his phone to hers.

" _Rank up!"_  the PDA chirped. " _Hirasaka Douhan has been promoted to J-rank of JUNGLE! Congratulations!"_

"Oh," she said, because it seemed like such a simple and obvious solution now. Most of Fushimi's plans were like that—neat and clean and hidden in plain sight. In the wake of his suicide mission, she'd managed to forget how  _smart_  he really was.

"Oh, indeed," he repeated, mockingly. "Well? Take us up, J-rank."

"As if you have to tell me," she said, and the world exploded into a vision of green.

She took them all the way to the surface in one fell swoop, and it was easy, so easy, like breathing the sweetest mouthful of air she'd ever tasted. A part of her suddenly mourned the fact that she couldn't stay like this forever, flooded with the power of a true Green clansman—but it was only a very small part of her, and the feeling of imminent loss was nothing compared to her relief that they were going to make it out alive.

It hardly mattered that people were obviously dying several floors below them, as long as she and Fushimi weren't among that number.

No one had ever accused her of being a nice person.

* * *

She almost felt like a nice person, though, when she felt Hisui Nagare die.

Almost, almost nice enough to cry for him.

* * *

"Mission complete, sir," Fushimi said when they finally reached the surface, while Douhan stared just past the Blue King's face—or was it the former Blue King, now?

"Well done," Munakata said, and while most of the sentiment was obviously directed towards Fushimi, some of the approval in his gaze was falling on Douhan too.

She gave him a flat, unimpressed look.

Fushimi, at least, was pleased to have his efforts recognized—for a certain value of  _pleased_ , anyway. He wasn't even grumbling, despite his injury. Douhan suspected that he was pleased for other reasons, too—after all, until very recently, Munakata Reisi's death had seemed inevitable. But now there were no Swords in the sky, and there never would be again.

They were ushered to an ambulance with far more fanfare than she would've liked. She hadn't known it was possible to be enthusiastically worried, but somehow the Blue clansmen were just that. Apparently she wasn't the only one who was glad that Fushimi's grumpy head was still attached to his body.

They were...much less pleased to see her standing behind Fushimi, but she didn't care. Their King hadn't said anything, which was as good as giving an order to leave her alone, so the Blues couldn't exactly make her go. Still, they glanced between her and Fushimi with a sort of restless uneasiness whenever they weren't actively fussing over their third-in-command.

Douhan met all of their gazes and managed—just barely—not to roll her eyes.

The paramedics, she noticed absently, were wearing the sharp blue uniforms of Scepter 4—because of course, of  _course_  the Blue clan would have their own medical staff. That, at least, explained the odd deference in their posture as they inspected Fushimi's thigh and carefully tugged at his torn pants with tweezers.

It also explained the barely-contained terror on their faces when one of them told Fushimi, "Uh, sir, we're going to have to take your pants off."

The other Blue clansmen immediately scattered with a speed that actually impressed Douhan. Fushimi snorted and said, "Go ahead."

They looked at Douhan, who hadn't moved an inch, with clear uncertainty.

"Waiting for my hairband," she said, gesturing towards Fushimi's leg.

The paramedics exchanged bewildered glances and looked to Fushimi for guidance.

Fushimi snorted again. "I said,  _go ahead_." He even undid his belt.

"Yes sir," they said, practically in unison, and suddenly the ambulance was a whirlwind of motion as dressings and medical tape were plopped onto the bed and applied to the newly exposed wound on a newly half-pantsless Fushimi.

At a far more sedate pace, she moved towards the front of the ambulance and settled against the back of the driver's seat.

Fushimi looked over his shoulder at her, a familiar exasperation on his face. "Don't you have somewhere else to be?"

She shook her head. "Nowhere at all, seeing as you and your lot just took out my former employer."

Fushimi blinked, for once actually looking like the awkward teenager that his age implied. "...ah."

"Also, being around you is the easiest way to get a semi-private meeting with your king."

"Ah." Now Fushimi seemed surer of himself. "Chasing down your payment?"

He was right, but not in the way he thought he was. She smiled faintly. "Something like that."

"Hmmm." He leaned back. "...the other Greens...they're leaving."

"Yes," she said simply. There wasn't much else to say, not when they could both feel the departure of their Clansmen.

"If you want to leave with them," Fushimi said quietly, "you should go now. Your aura's already fading. In a day or two, you might not even be able to sense them."

"I am not going with them."

He raised an eyebrow.

She smiled faintly. "Did you think that I was part of their family, Fushimi?"

"No," he said, "but I  _was_  under the impression that Mishakuji is your friend."

"As much as he can be anyone's friend, yes, he is." She looked at him innocently. "But it's possible to be friends with someone without being obsessive and stalkerish, you know."

He glared at her.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked, even more innocently.

"Like you don't know," he muttered under his breath.

She let it go. She could afford to, since she was right.

As soon as the paramedics finished doing damage control, Fushimi made a half-hearted effort to cover himself up again. It wasn't very successful, since the pants were bloody and knife-damaged, and the dressings got in the way.

There was only one paramedic with them at this point; the others had gone to the front. He kept opening and shutting his mouth, clearly working up the courage to say something about what Fushimi was doing.

"You should leave it," Douhan said to Fushimi, taking pity on the poor paramedic. "You probably have to go to the hospital for stitches, anyway."

The paramedic gave her a grateful look, while Fushimi gave her a...less than grateful look. "I don't see why they can't just stitch me up  _here_ ," he grumbled.

"This is hardly the most sterile place to do it."

"It wouldn't be the worst place I've gotten stitches in."

She raised an eyebrow. "Somehow, that doesn't convince me that it'd be a good idea to get a five centimeter deep wound stitched up in the back of an ambulance."

"I didn't claim that it was a good idea," Fushimi pointed out.

"Do you often go along with things that you  _know_  aren't good ideas? That explains quite a lot about you."

He caught the hidden thread of her argument and yanked it. "Is this about how I almost got myself killed for turning Nagare down?" His voice was curt.

"I don't know," she said, raising an eyebrow, "is it?"

"It sounds like it."

"Then why bother asking?"

"Occasionally, I find it easier to be polite first, and hostile second."

"To  _be_  polite, or  _pretend_  to be polite? No, never mind. I know the answer to that."

He wrinkled his nose. "You make it sound like I live to stab people."

She pointedly removed a gauntlet and inspected a fading knife mark on her arm.

"I  _don't_  live to stab people," he said, maybe a little petulantly.

With a light click, she peeled off another piece of her armor, revealing another patch of otherwise smooth creamy skin broken up by healing wounds.

" _That_  was for a good cause." Fushimi said, dry but not entirely without humor.

"By which you mean your Captain's cause?"

"The Captain is many things," he said, snorting, "but  _good_  is not one of them. Not consistently, anyways."

"I feel so much better knowing that you skewered me for him, then."

"He lectured me for injuring you, actually."

That made her stand up, straight and alert. "Oh. Oh really. Because I could've sworn that you  _just_  said you knifed me for a good cause."

"I did. Burning off frustration  _is_  a good cause."

She let out a disbelieving laugh. "Was that a joke, Fushimi? You should try to die more often. It makes you a more entertaining person."

"I'm glad you find my pain amusing."

"I don't find your pain amusing. I find you in pain amusing."

"Oh, what  _completely different_  concepts those are," he deadpanned.

She tilted her head. "You know," she said, "it was a good idea, infiltrating our Clan the way you did. It was actually a  _very_  good idea, except for the fact that you didn't plan out your endgame."

"I  _did_  plan it out," he muttered.

"Planning to die is not planning it out."

"I  _did_  try to have a contingency plan. Of sorts."

"Subtly hinting to your almost-boyfriend that you want him to rescue you is  _not_  a contingency plan."

"How—" He gave her a sharp look, forgoing comment on the phrase 'almost-boyfriend' because there was something much more disturbing on his mind. "You were watching us." His voice was thick with growing horror.

She raised an eyebrow. "Why does that surprise you?"

"How  _long_  were you there?" he asked, the pitch of his voice going comically high.

"Long enough to see your tender farewell scene," she said, making an effort not to smile or show any expression.

All the blood rushed out of his face before returning with a vengeance, blooming in splotchy red patches. "You—"

"It was very sweet."

"Hira—"

"Brought a tear to my eye."

"Don't—"

"A romance for the ages."

"I will  _cut you_ , don't think for minute that I won't."

She looked at his injury.

He rolled his eyes. "I will still cut you."

"Yes, yes. I know you'd cut me, I have the scabs to prove it." She tilted her head. "You're...funny, you know. You went out of your way to plant the notion of rescuing you in his head, but then you were surprised that he actually came for you."

"If it were you, you would've been surprised too," he said accusingly.

"True enough. What he did...it's not what I would have done."

Even more accusingly, he muttered, "No, obviously it  _is_  what you would've done, because you literally  _just did it_."

"I got paid to do it," she said.

He rolled his eyes. "Not yet, you haven't."

"I got half of my payment for it," she amended. "I'll go get the other half in a moment."

Somehow, that seemed to set him at ease—as if her business-as-usual attitude made the world settle on its axis. "What's stopping you?" He murmured, as he tossed her hairband back to her. It was stretched out, now, and probably wouldn't ever go back to its original dimensions, but she could repurpose it, at least.

"Like I said—you in pain amuses me." She wound the hairtie into one loop around her hand. Two loops. Three. "You think he should have let you die?" she asked idly.

"That's not..." he made a sharp, frustrated tsking sound. "I'm not a death-seeker, Hirasaka."

"But you do think that he shouldn't have rescued you."

"Yes. No. Who even knows." He huffed. "It worked—I survived, so  _obviously_  it worked. But it was so, so stupid."

"If it's stupid and it works," Douhan said, "it isn't stupid."

"No, objectively, Misaki is very stupid."

"Well, alright, I'm not going to argue against that."

Fushimi snorted.

"But," she added, "there's a difference between stupidity and shortsightedness, and he only has a problem with the former."

"...whereas I have a problem with the latter?"

"Yes."

Fushimi scoffed slightly, because he was too smart for his own good sometimes—most of the time—and he didn't know when to play along. "Speak for yourself, Hirasaka."

"It's almost as if," Douhan chided gently, "I recognize these things in you because I recognize them in myself."

He narrowed his eyes at her, but conceded the point with the tiniest of shrugs. There was nothing graceful about the gesture, but it was there.

She smiled at him benignly, taking his surrender in the way it was meant—as an armistice, not a treaty. "Either way, I can't imagine that you want to walk around wearing torn pants. If you want me to get your spare clothes from my apartment, I'm going to insist that you go to the hospital."

And then Fushimi clicked his tongue and glared at her with the kind of hostility he hadn't shown her since their first meeting, and she realized her mistake, because the Blue King was standing  _right there_ , at the door of the ambulance.

"Oh?" Munakata gave them both a piercing glance. "Surely it's far too early in your relationship to start living in sin? Congratulations, nonetheless." He smiled with such cheer and enthusiasm that it practically glowed.

Douhan stared at him.

Fushimi stared at him, too. Then he clicked his tongue and said, "We're not living together."

"Well, at the very least, I hope you're using protection," Munakata said solicitously.

"We're not together, period," Fushimi said, a look of horror slowly dawning on his face as Munakata kept talking.

"Now, now, surely you know that you still need protection," Munakata said. "The passions of youth are so easily swayed, after all—"

By silent mutual agreement, she got them both out of there as fast as her dampened powers could manage it.

* * *

Fushimi started bleeding as soon as they landed in her apartment, though, so she had to drag him to the hospital anyways.

The nurse mistook her for his mother, and the doctor mistook her for his wife, and she couldn't tell which assumption was more horrifying.

She told them both that she was his sister, and it was even more horrifying that she couldn't think of a more believable alternative.

* * *

Two days later she was walking through the hallways of Scepter 4, because obviously Fushimi had left the hospital against medical advice, and  _obviously_  he had gone straight back to work.

His stubbornness was going to kill him someday, and she told him as much when she found him in his office, surrounded by the Great Wall of Paperwork.

He didn't seem surprised to see her. "Hirasaka Douhan," he drawled, like an echo of the day he'd broken her out of her cage, "what do you want now?"

"You know," she said, picking her words carefully, "I owe you an apology."

He raised an eyebrow.

"For saying that you shouldn't be loyal to a dying man," she clarified.

He clicked his tongue. "Why are you apologizing for that  _now?"_

She shrugged. "When the Green King died...I felt it. It was unexpectedly unpleasant."

"He wasn't your King," Fushimi said. While he didn't explicitly say  _it's not the same_ , she still heard it loud and clear.

"Not in any meaningful way, no," Douhan agreed. "So, it would've been worse for you, if it had been  _your_  King."

He threw her a disbelieving look. "And that's why you're apologizing?"

Serenely, she lifted her eyes to meet his. "Well, no. I'm apologizing because I'm going to be working for the Blue clan from now on, so it's in my best interest to clarify my opinion of Kings in general, and your King specifically."

It was so quiet that an ant crawling on the carpet would probably echo.

"What," Fushimi said, "the fuck."

"So please take care of me from now on, senpai," Douhan said, just a touch too cheerfully.

"What," Fushimi said again, "the  _fuck_."

 


End file.
